The present disclosure relates to symbolic parameters, and more specifically, to assigning values to these parameters on the fly.
One example operating-system-level programming language includes Job Control Language (JCL) which allows a user to provide a set of statements to an operating system about work that the user wants performed. The set of statements can be referred to as a “job”. These statements tell the operating system where to find appropriate input, how to process that input (e.g., what other program or programs to execute), and what to do with the resulting output.
In some environments such as, for example, software quality assurance or software testing, a number of jobs appear very similar except for minor changes to input and output file names. In other words, the executed steps are very similar but those steps might be performed with different input files and produce different output files whose file names may be similar to one another. In such circumstances, it is beneficial to develop techniques and methods to reuse as much of the programming code as possible to avoid developing, or re-developing, programming code unnecessarily.